14 September 2015

The Travails of a Babylonian Bureaucrat

This of course is a reference to the County Clerk in Kentucky
who has chosen to refuse all marriage licenses in light of the Supreme Court
decision in June 2015. She was found to be in contempt of court and imprisoned
for several days. Further confrontations are expected. She has been trumpeted
as a hero/martyr by the American Evangelical community. Secular society views
her as a nonconformist bigot and villain.

Sodomite marriage is a sinful travesty but Davis is probably
not a Christian and she and those who support her are in the wrong.

Kim Davis has chosen to work for Babylon. If you want to work
for the sword and serve as part of the sword-mechanism regulating society, then
you must follow its rules or face its wrath.

Is she's a Christian then she shouldn't have the job to begin
with. This is of course unacceptable to Dominionist theology or any Sacralist
impulse which demands the whole of society is to be subjugated to religious
rule or at the very least syncretised with it. This theology demands that all
spheres of society are to be Christianised... whatever that means. The
Scriptures do not utilize these categories and the philosophical assumptions
driving this way of thinking are quite foreign to the New Testament.

It must be stated in this strongest terms possible that this
position directly contradicts the teaching of the New Testament.

If Kim Davis can't follow the law, then she needs to quit.
She was free to do so at any time. She's an elected official and so she can't
be simply fired. She has to be 'removed' or impeached and such a process is
laborious. Those who have the power to do it are certainly unwilling as such a
move would destroy their own political standing and aspirations. The judge has
little choice. He can't fire her and she won't resign. Therefore he was
compelled to punish her to try and coerce her into changing her behaviour.

This is what government is... force. In this case the force
is the physical restraint of someone against their will. This threat of
violence which contains an even greater peril is implicit in all government
edicts. Government is the sword as Paul proclaims in Romans 13. This is
contrasted with the Christian who in Romans 12 looks to God for justice and
patiently sojourns awaiting delayed vengeance.

She deserved her punishment (1 Peter 4.15). If you want to be
an agent of Babylon then you have to play by its rules. Christian suffering is
gospel oriented. When Davis is serving as a government bureaucrat, she's not
furthering the gospel or building the Kingdom. It is only a confused and
perverted theology that thinks so.

It's one thing to make a moral stand and suffer the
consequences, it's another to demand the state bends to your will. Her action
doesn't even fall under the auspices of non-participation. She is forcing her
views on others and forcing them to spend their money and time to seek the
services (in other counties) her office is supposed to be administering. These
are the services they pay taxes to support, the very same taxes which pay her
salary.

While we certainly do not sympathize with sodomite
aspirations or values, the bottom line is that Kim Davis is in the wrong.

She's not suffering as a Christian but as a busybody in other
people's affairs.

This hypocrisy is further demonstrated by the fact that when numerous
officials prior to the SCOTUS ruling insisted (for conscience sake) on
rejecting state laws and/or DOMA and issuing marriage licenses to homosexuals,
they were decried as law breaking renegades by the very same Christian Right
that now comes to the aid of Davis. Their appeals to conscience were hypocritically
rejected as invalid. That's not to suggest they were morally right, but in
terms of government function they were doing the same thing Davis has done.

If they can't follow the law, they should have quit as should
Davis.

Davis is being used. The Christian Right is trying to fire
Parthian shots at the Left which has gained the ascendancy in terms of social
morality. On another front the Right's synthesis with Capitalist Imperialism
still rules the day. They have in fact gained ground in recent years. But on
the social front the Christian Right project is in serious trouble. At present
they are desperate to rally numerical and financial support under the rubric of
religious freedom. Davis is being utilized as a rallying point and a means to
stoke paranoia and a feeling of desperation.

Davis is an apropos symbol of the hypocrisy and
short-sightedness at work in Evangelical circles. Her multiple divorces exemplify
the slipping morality present in Evangelical circles. Evangelicals promote marriage
and family but are just as guilty in destroying it as society at large. Because
of numbers and money, and certainly their political aspirations they sold out
on this issue back in the 1980's. The American Church has little to say on the
matter. Due to hypocrisy in the realm of marriage and the innumerable scandals
the Church has all but lost its moral authority on these issues.

The fact that Davis was 'converted' just a few years ago in
no way detracts from this point. The Church refuses to deal with this issue and
the nominalist Christianity that reigns throughout Appalachia and the South
demonstrates this. The lie of so-called Christian culture is exposed so
poignantly in the culture of divorce.

The fact that Davis is part of a denomination that denies the
Trinity has also created numerous difficulties. The confusion over this is
lamentable.

Oneness Pentecostalism adheres to a Modalist Christology, a
type of Unitarianism, but rather than reject Christ's divinity, they reject his
humanity and believe the three persons of the Trinity are but names, modes or
aspects of one God. This presents significant problems in understanding how
Christ as Saviour could properly be spoken of as the Second Adam or the High
Priest that represents us. These are critical points in Romans, Hebrews and 1
Corinthians.

We've seen the same confusion in recent years with regard to
Mormonism (Romney and Beck) or most recently with Seventh-Day Adventist Ben
Carson proclaiming his 'humble' (?!?!?) Christianity vis-à-vis Trump's arrogant
false Christianity.

And the profession of Kim Davis must also be doubted. Though
I will grant her theology though perilously defective is at least closer to the
Gospel truth than Mormonism or even Carson's Adventism.

And yet online I've seen many rally to her cause and insist
this is a moral issue and not a theological one.

That's interesting. Some of these same people who were and are
very critical of Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) have now embraced
the same kind of argument made by its proponents in 1994. The ECT signers said
that despite the theological differences there's a common social and moral
cause that permits if not mandates the alliance.

Defenders of Davis on this premise are guilty of the same
error as well as the larger theological error of identifying this (or any)
society apart from the Church as somehow being Christian.

What strikes me the most in all of this is the confusion.
This event just continues to muddy the waters and distract from the real issues
at stake. People are buried by fear and anger and other sentimentalities. The
Bible's teaching is nowhere in sight. At best they can only appeal to a confused
comparison of Old Testament Israel and the United States as well as a
theological-mythology of American history and a man-made meta-narrative to go
with it.

Davis needs to resign and repent and be converted to the
Biblical gospel rooted in the Christ of Scripture. The legalism and Pentecostal
doctrine also flow from this flawed understanding of Christ's person and work.

We are called by the New Testament to live as sojourners,
strangers and pilgrims, as second class citizens who obey the law but speak the
truth. When we remove political office and aspirations to power, our message
can convey its spiritual nature. Men will hate us but they will not view us as
political threats... at least not right away. And when they do view us as
subversive, then our testimony is rooted in the Gospel and not cultural conquest
or the utilization of the sword trying to force others to bend to our will.

What have we to do with those who are outside? God will judge
them. Fallen man cannot be subject to God's law. Do these people not understand
the spiritual nature of God's commandments?

The confusion is all the more dangerous in that it detracts
from our primary battleground. The spiritual battle set up in the New Testament
isn't a battle over control of culture, the rule of the Beast's empires. The
battle is spiritual and largely within the Church. We are to fight against
those who bring in false teachings, those who subvert the authority of the
Apostles (Scripture) and those who would lead God's people to follow the ways
of the world.

This struggle with regard to Kim Davis is a masterstroke by
the enemy. More than ever the Church is distracted by the fight for America,
taking up arms, lawsuits, threats, a violent hatred of the world, and
consequently embracing an ethic of power that rejects Christ's ethic of the
Kingdom.

The enemy is among us.

Finally though it's been addressed before, the Biblical
examples must be briefly considered. What about Paul? What about Daniel?

Isn't Kim Davis following their examples?

Not at all.

Paul while imprisoned in Philippi exercised his rights as a
citizen in rebuking the magistrates that had criminally ordered him beaten and
incarcerated.

Or did he?

He didn't pursue it. He exposed their grievous injustice,
shamed them and then walked away. He could have presided over their removal
from office and possibly being put in chains themselves. He dropped the matter
and let it go. What a contrast compared to the vicious impulse to litigate in
today's Evangelical community, to call on the state to violently enforce their
will on others.

Paul appealed to Caesar. Yes, he did. There were dozens of
assassins after him and his appeal was a means to insure his continued
high-security incarceration and ultimately his Apostolic mission to Rome. Paul
wanted to arrive in Rome in chains. That was important to him in terms of his
ministry. His actions were not normative but even if they were, they do not
support the activism and litigation of the Christian Right that seeks revenge
when wronged.

Paul's appeal to Caesar is something very different from contemporary
politically motivated Christians filing lawsuits and demanding the exercise of
rights.

Daniel like Joseph was a captive. He did not seek the office.
It was thrust upon him. With regard to Daniel we know next to nothing of his
official duties. His private prayer was not connected to his office. He was not
charged with violation of office but breaking an unjust and idolatrous law.

Joseph of course embarked on an economic programme that is
highly problematic for modern American Evangelicals. They wouldn't want to
consider the implications of his actions. Despite the utter repudiation of
their own agendas and narratives, I don't believe Joseph is an example that we
are called to reiterate in our time.

What of the Centurions, the one in Matthew 8, as well as
Cornelius in Acts 10?

All arguments on this point are from silence and we can just
as easily say they sought to leave the legions in the days subsequent to their
gospel encounters. Of course that wasn't always easy to do. It was a hard personal
lesson for me to learn but we are called where we are at and we can't always
disentangle ourselves immediately. It takes time. They may have been able to
serve out their terms peacefully and retired or they may have come into
conflict and ended up in difficulty. We're simply not told.

But we are told not to enslave ourselves to others. We are
not to seek to be bound. No Christians should seek these entanglements let
alone seek power over others. The military represent both and the Early Church
largely understood this. There certainly were deviations from this view in the
centuries before Constantine but they do not represent the norm.
Post-Constantine the Church abandoned the Biblical position wholesale.

The Bible provides no support for Kim Davis or those of like
aspiration. She's right. She absolutely cannot issue those licenses. That would
be sinful. But she shouldn't have been involved in the work in the first place.
She wishes to be modest and yet her position of authority belies her claims.
Her occupation and her conduct are hardly shamefaced.

I pray the Church learns something from this episode but in
this case the positions represented here are truly a voice in the wilderness.